The Curious Case of Suffolk
The Curious Case of Suffolk is a short 3D adventure/narrative FPS demo I created as part of my senior thesis for my final year at the University of the Arts. The player explores an abandoned mansion and attempts to uncover the dark secrets of the owner, as well as solve the mystery of the town of Suffolk’s sudden and mysterious abandonment. Built in Unreal Engine 5, the thesis is primarily to act as a demonstration of my skills in the game art asset pipeline, environmental modeling and storytelling, and abilities to work in-engine to create a finalized scene.
More screenshots, videos, pre-production art, thoughts and plans when developing and more can be found below.
This quick concept demo is an intended run-through of what's currently available and meant to show what the final game or project may look like in terms of mood, graphical fidelity, and gameplay.
This video is just a short intro cinematic I created to give player’s a brief introduction and setup to the story. I unfortunately ran out of time before finishing the thesis, so I couldn’t implement it in-engine.
Below, you can view a slideshow of my pitch presentation to the class and instructors Project Suffolk.
In this slideshow, you get a rough overview of the ideas and purpose of the project, gameplay ideas, mood boards, and a timeline of development.
Also worth noting, slides #6 to #11, featuring a rough mockup in Unreal Engine 4 of where the game was supposed to take place. This is because this pitch took place about midway through the year, so this (plus the pre-production, planning, and brainstorming) was all that took place during the first half of year of the class.
Unfortunately, being halfway through my allotted time frame, it was clear I could not fully flesh out an open world environment featuring a full village/town. I hadn’t even begun implementing gameplay mechanics yet, so all of that work had to be scrapped. Luckily, even from the beginning when I first started planning this thesis project, I sort of layered it in a way that I could continuously cut back features or scope, so that in a case like this, I still had the core game to rely on.
Slides #12 to #15 showcase quick concepting I had done in Blender, both for the overall level layout, as well as some of the originally building assets I was planning on building. Finally, the last few slides showcase some plugins and asset packs I would use to speed up development time.
Since I ended up running out of time to work on the open world village aspect, I decided to focus on the core level the player would actually go through. This being the manor of one Mr. Mallory, the central character in the story, of which a lot of the game’s mystery and story revolves around. I never got around to figuring exactly what his role was in the game/story, but he would have been someone very popular, affluent, and influential to the town of Suffolk. Below are some plans and assets I created for this.
The top left features a couple modular assets I had created to build out the manor environment.
The top right showcases the outside of what the manor would have looked like (originally created when I still thought I had time to create a whole open world town in 1 years’ time).
Finally the bottom 3 images show a floor plan I had mapped out to demonstrate the space, and purpose of rooms for the level, using Blender’s Grease Pencil. This was pretty fun to do actually and Grease Pencil proves to be a great tool for implementing drawing and 2D designs within a 3D space.
Here is a small collage of more screenshots from the finished product (“finished” being a loose term here), originally the rough block out of the open world town I showcased in the slideshow previously used Unreal Engine 4. This is Unreal Engine 5 in all its early access glory, I had plans to take more advantage of Nanite but being in an interior environment, I didn’t get to experiment with it as much as I would have liked. I suppose this is for the best though, as I still tried to keep a modest polycount and texture size for all the assets.
Really, the main benefit of UE5 was using Lumen for real-time software global illumination. Baking light probes is a hassle, especially when you're in final’s week, and the deadline for this and several other projects are approaching fast.
I also made heavy use for assets I downloaded online from various places to set dress and fill the rooms with detail, hoping it would significantly cut down time. The problem was a lot of the assets and models I downloaded had issues that I had to spend a lot of time fixing and making sure it would fit with the other assets. Fixing bad topology, hidden or overlapping faces, creating UVs, and occasionally retexturing to make sure it fit in with my art style. I can’t complain too much though, the assets I had gotten were all free, so really, I’m thankful that other artists had gone out of their way to upload their models for free, I just wasn’t aware how much time I’d have to spend adjusting assets to fit my needs and art style, which should’ve been obvious in hindsight.
Finally, to the left here is an edited and presentable version of my original document detailing all my ideas and plans for the project. This was printed out and presented when we did our thesis showcase, so it feels prudent to display it here as well.
Reading through might be able to give a better sense of what the project was supposed to look like, though despite it being edited, it may still come across as random and incoherent ramblings.
That about covers it for Project Suffolk, my senior thesis game demo.
All things considered; I suppose it turned out all right in the end, especially considering a lot of the work I did in the first half got cut out, but that’s the nature of development I suppose.
I will say, after I finally finished it and turned it in, I was completely and totally sick of working on it. Mostly because I wasn’t very happy with how it was turning out, frankly, I wanted to complete scrap everything and start again, but obviously that wasn’t feasible nor would it have been good for my final grade. In fact, around the halfway point when I threw out the work on the town, I was heavily considering switching game engines to Unity, mainly because I think what really held me back was my lack of programming knowledge and ability.
For this project, I used the FPS Story Adventure Template by palinoia interactive on the Epic Marketplace, and while it’s a great plugin to provide a good starting base, I honestly have little to no experience with Blueprints and programming in Unreal. I did want to learn, and still plan to, but being an artist first and foremost, I was mostly concerned with creating all the assets, and I never really got around to deep diving into Blueprints. I do have a bit of experience working with Unity, both as a generalized tool for 3D and other interactive work (see my page on CIM Work), as a game development platform. I’m not super competent by any means, nor am I proficient in C#, but I do know that platform from a technical development standpoint a bit more.
As of right now, my biggest gripe with my current demo is that the gameplay mechanics are very basic, and I even encountered a few bugs, or at least design oversights. What would the project have looked like if I had tried switching to Unity halfway through? I wonder.
With all that said, I suppose I do feel pretty good about how it turned out overall, now a few months later. It did set out to accomplish what I mainly intended it to, that is, to showcase my experience mainly as a 3D artist, and improve my asset production pipeline skills, practice building modular assets, and fitting them together in-engine as a playable level, set-dressing, lighting, and level composition.
That’s all, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, and checking out my senior thesis project. Maybe someday I’ll pick this back up and continue development.